Course Areas: Business and Commercial Law
Law And Society/ Interdisciplinary

Time:2:30p-4:00p MW Location:209 BLB

Course Outline: This course will develop students’ skills in analytic methods likely to be used in the practice of law. The skills emphasized will be (1) statistics, which is often useful in analyzing data and examining expert witnesses; (2) decision analysis, often used both by business people and useful to lawyers making strategic decisions; (3) finance, frequently used in transactional law as well as litigation; (4) game theory, critical in analyzing situations in which you are up against an adversary; and (5) economic analysis of law, useful in creating mechanisms likely to lead to desired behavior as well as analysis of regulations.

Course Syllabus:

Course Notes: Students will work in small teams to develop a project in conjunction with Professor Chandler that applies one or more of these skills to a body of data or a particular issue of interest to the student. Students will be instructed in use of the Mathematica programming language that will be used to develop these projects. Satisfactory projects will be submitted to a peer-reviewed website, demonstrations.wolfram.com for publication. Your grade will depend 50% on each of five quizzes covering these areas and 50% on your project score. There will not be a cumulative final exam.

The texts for the course will be Jackson, Kaplow, et. al, Analytical Methods for Lawyers; Ayres, Supercrunchers: Why Thinking by Numbers is the New Way to Be Smart; and a book to be named later providing a primer on the Mathematica programming language. Students will also need to purchase for $7 a Mathematica license.

Mathematical aptitude is more important for success in this course than mathematical knowledge. If you have historically performed reasonably well in math courses, you will not be disadvantaged in this course. You do not need to remember how to do algebra or calculus.

Prerequisites: Students who are mathphobic or who have not performed well in math classes should not enroll in this course without discussing the matter with the instructor. Some computer programming experience is also useful background, with knowledge of Java, C, Lisp, XML (not really a language), Maple, or Matlab particularly helpful. No knowledge of Mathematica is assumed.